Published: 15 April 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
For anyone with access to the internet, there is no news here about the fraught relationship between English Jews and the UK Labour party under Corbyn.
There had been much debate among Jewish Labour supporters and activists about the extent of the problem, but by March this year some sort of consensus had emerged across Jewish communities, with as many as 2000 Jews gathered just days before Passover at a communal rally against pervasive anti-Semitism in the party, with the call of “Dayeinu”, meaning of course, ‘enough’ in the theme of the festival.
This much seems beyond dispute: there is a deep problem in the party, with catalogues of complaints about old tropes of Jews and control and money, as well as broad and loud anti Zionism. At best, Corbyn has been bizarrely unaware of problems and at worst, despite awareness, he has fed the problem by his conduct and silence. So when he chose to attend the very fringe Jewdas seder with its deliberately irreverent and strongly anti-Zionist tone, even his supporters were moved to criticise the decision.
The debate exposes fault lines around how Jewish communities respond to the anti-Zionism that is so pervasive on the Left. It’s familiar for Australian Jews – in 2016 Greens candidate for Melbourne Ports, Stephanie Hodgins May withdrew from an event to be hosted at the Jewish communal centre managed by Zionism Victoria because, well, Zionism.
There was some dissembling about when she had been told who was hosting the event (she was given that information when she was invited) and some grandstanding about a comment about Zionism made at the UN (which had nothing to do with Zionism Victoria). The nub of it was that when it became clear to her that core Green supporters wouldn’t tolerate her attending an event hosted by a Zionist body, she chose to withdraw herself from a Jewish communal event in the electorate which she hoped (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to represent in Federal Parliament.
That’s the guts of it - for many on the Left, Israel and Zionism are so profoundly problematic that any association is infective and needs to be cleansed. In many political settings, in order to be welcomed, Jews are required to declare their anti-Israel position or at the very least stay ”shtum” in the face of anti-Zionist discourse.
In such settings there is no room for discussion about complexity, no space to talk about the concessions offered by earlier Israeli governments and rejected, or to question whether this is properly the most burning issue for progressive movements.
So even in the face of ugly anti-Zionist rhetoric, generalised and blunt criticism of Israel’s actions and foundations, and disproportionate focus on Israel, Jews are told that such views are not about Jews but about Zionism and there is therefore no case to answer for any experience of exclusion, hurt, and anger.
And that any such claim is in fact just a ruse to silence critique on Israel, that complaining about anti-Semitism in this way is a kind of white privilege, used to deflect focus from bigger questions about the responsibilities of Jews for Israel’s conduct.
Are those critiques fair? The history of left anti-Zionism reveals some questionable motivations. The tendency within Jewish communities to react swiftly, perhaps excessively, to perceived anti-Semitism, and to include harsh critique of Israel in this bucket, is neither consciously evasive nor entirely paranoid.
And it goes well beyond deflection about Israel; it reflects layers of direct experience and emotional heritage baked into Jewish identities that won’t be addressed by telling people to stop feeling what they feel.
Which is not to say that deflection plays no role. Within established Jewish communal spaces, conversations about violence and human rights violations experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or about discrimination experienced by Palestinian Israelis are not generally welcomed, even as recent Israeli governments have veered to the right on so many issues. Discussion is often dominated by spin, as if every discussion is a PR battle.
Many Jewish communal leaders struggle to accept that it is legitimate to express deep concern about Israel’s current and future direction, to critically review events in Israel’s past, and there is scant acceptance for the view that a thoughtful analysis of the inherent problems of Zionism as a political movement might be disagreeable to those of us who identify as Zionists, but it is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
At the same time, it is also true that theJewish community is changing, albeit slowly. Leadership profiles are changing and there are places where conversations about Israel are more open and nuanced. And it’s worth saying that the reluctance of many Jews to publicly criticise Israel is less about deflection than about a sense that the issue is already excessively a focus of the Left, and that there is no need to fuel that.
So yes, sometimes Jewish communal responses to anti-Zionism and the excessive focus on Israel feel like deflection and “what aboutery” but at the same time, it is fair to question what motivates the Left’s disproportionate focus and selective view on Zionism, the nationalism that developed in response to the worst kind of oppression imaginable.
In words written last week by a peace activist who has long stopped identifying as a Zionist “… after 30 years of criticising Israel's failure to apologise, reconcile and coexist with Palestine, I know … that the venom spewing forth against Israel from the Arab world, indeed much of the world, while the Assads and the ayatollahs, and the Gulf clerics, and the kings of Wahhabism, and Saddam and Gaddafi were free to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands and displace millions…. is not just hypocrisy, it is … anti-Jewish hatred, and we Jews of conscience have joined the chorus without realising how sick that chorus really is”. https://crdc.gmu.edu/about/staff/marc-gopins-bio/]
Behind these words is the pain that people seem unable to see that it’s not an either/or proposition. It’s quite possible to advocate for justice for Palestinians, and at the same time to recognise that anti-Zionism can also be about discomfort about the place of Jewishness, if not about Jews.
In reality, very few people seem able or willing to speak both languages which probably says more about the polarised nature of discourse on Israel/Palestine than about a culture of deflection.
Many Jews feel inhibited by communal disapproval from advocating more strongly against Israeli policy or feel that while it won’t change anything in Israel, it will make things more difficult for Jews in their own communities. And people in progressive circles quickly fall in with the “Israel is all evil” camp and overlook the way that parlays into damaging sentiment against local Jewish communities.
That’s the shame. The discussion about how progressive politics intersects with Jewish community experience has become one more space where polarised language and positions force people into tight corners before they have even started talking and listening.
Photo: The Federalist
